BRAINWAVES (1983)
Article 3871 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 3-11-2012
Posting Date: 3-20-2012
Directed by Ulli Lommel
Featuring Keir Dullea, Suzanna Love, Vera Miles
Country: USA
What it is: Science fiction crime thriller

A housewife suffers a brain injury in a car accident that leaves her in a coma with little chance of recovery. Her family agrees to an experimental procedure that reprograms the electrical impulses in her brain. Though the process works, there is a side effect; the person who posthumously provided the electrical impulses was in fact a murder victim… and the housewife is beginning to remember the victim’s final moments…

I’ve only seen two other of Ulli Lommel’s movies at this point – THE TENDERNESS OF THE WOLVES and THE BOOGEYMAN. Ulli Lommel’s reputation, as I’m given to understand, was that after the promising start of his first movie (WOLVES), he descended into an abyss of awfulness from which he never recovered, and certainly there was nothing in THE BOOGEYMAN to convince me that it wasn’t true. So I was expecting the worst going into this one, but, truth to tell, I didn’t find this one an atrocity; in fact, I found it rather engaging at some points. It’s certainly not a mess like THE BOOGEYMAN; the story is simple, concise and clear, the performances are solid, and the movie, though a bit slow-moving, doesn’t overstay its welcome. Granted, the story isn’t really that original, though in most of the other variations on the story, it’s usually some psychic power that makes someone privy to the dead person’s final moments, and it could be pointed out that this movie spends a lot of its running time getting to the point that a similar movie might reach in the first five minutes. There’s a few other script problems (including a rather useless twist ending), but I find it a definite step up after THE BOOGEYMAN. Still, a sort on Ulli Lommel’s directorial oeuvre by rating on IMDB puts this as his third best movie, and if it’s only okay, that doesn’t bode well for the rest of his work.